I really, really want to hate Miley Cyrus (mostly because of the sins of her father and that stupid god damned tongue), mostly out of some sort of middle age angst where I hate all the kids on the grass, and in fairness, I do find most of her antics to be unbearable, but she really is quite talented:

You can be blinded by hatred for the girl, but that doesn’t mean you have to be deaf. That’s pretty good music right there.

https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpg00John Colehttps://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpgJohn Cole2014-01-29 22:41:532014-01-29 22:41:53Since I Never Talk About Politics Any More

Well, don’t hate me but I’ve met Billy Ray Cyrus several times and he’s actually a really cool guy. Comes from a long line of prominent Kentuclky Democrats. I don’t know what’s up with his daughter and that stupid tongue thing but hey, kids today, what do I know. The music may be meh but Billy Ray the person is really cool.

I will love her for the great GOP parody she did on SNL where she played Michelle Bacchman and for putting out Party in the USA so Tokyo Police Club could cover it. I think she is a smart girl who is doing Madonna in a way that Britney Spears and others couldn’t do.

She’s quite talented. I found myself liking her when I was bored one afternoon and watched “last song” while working on whatever. Better actor than the godforsaken teen show could ever have prepared me for and can actually sing a real note. The tongue thing only reminds me of giraffe. Which means when she does it, I see a giraffe head on her neck, twerking. I also dislike the cultural appropriation of blackness, in particular the crudest parts, from the safe cocoon of not just whiteness, but blond, rich cuteness-but that’s another discussion.

I think she is a smart girl who is doing Madonna in a way that Britney Spears and others couldn’t do.

Hope that’s the outcome rather than her ending up as the Millenial Michael Jackson, I guess, talented but FUBARed in every other way. If I had her fame and money, I’d either be dead or living anonymously under a false name by now. She’d be smart as hell to take the money and pursue the latter course, though I know it would require a shit-ton more effort on her part than the average Witness Protection Program client.

@LAC As an old white male and yes older than the site owner I don’t pay attention to her but she is very talented. I also think good for her to throw up the act to get to where ever she going the music world. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to a young women in this world and she had the name to start with unlike so many others that get thrown under the bus after one hit..

Please don’t shoot, but this is the first time I heard this song. My reaction is (1) ridiculously good song and (2) pretty good singer. She has more heart than I gave her credit for. It still strikes me as a little overproduced for a ‘backyard sessions’. Clearly someone is still a bit defensive about her a little bit country / a little bit Disney-the-Weyland-Yutani-of-monolithic-entertainment-corporations image.

When my now-high-school age granddaughter was younger I had to sit through many Disney channel programs with her. It was mainly torture but Miley Cyrus could make me laugh out loud even on a stupid Disney show. Her music doesn’t thrill me but I only listen to our local 24/7 classical station and a local classic rock station so I’m no judge. While I find her on stage antics a bit weird I’ve seen weirder & worse done during the 60’s-70’s so that doesn’t trouble me and, at least in the interview she did with Rolling Stone not too long ago, she sounded fairly well grounded for her age.

I’m old and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is really hard for someone who becomes a star at a young age to not be troubled. It can be done and some parents of kids who made it big keep them stable and grounded, but more often than not, the pressures and freedom of being a “star” are too much for a kid to deal with. When I’m feeling judgmental, I think it’s because really responsible parents won’t let their kids go into a business when they are still in their teens. But maybe that’s because I would never have let my child go into singing, or acting or even devote themselves to gymnastics or figure skating to the extent that they could become celebrities.

I hope Myley Cyrus finds happiness and is able to use her talent to be happy and have a good life.

Probably she does the tongue thing just because it makes people recoil. I’m just grateful there was not video of my wild youth, I did much worse. I do have an associated soft spot for her because she has always reminded me very much of a girl very dear to me. I watched her grow up as well, she is older, but when Miley “graduated” it was very like how this girl carried on at that age. And I’d have fit the description myself as well decades since, maybe why I have the soft spot in the first place.

Weird how you see someone you don’t know but you fell like you’d like them or not.

Actually she seems remarkably normal to me, considering the Disney thing. She’s very much sex-positive, and owns her sexuality as a natural part of being a person, it’s refreshing. The thing I liked best about Wrecking Ball is that she is the agent. She didn’t “fall” in love like it’s a pothole, he didn’t seduce her, or magic, she is the action. She “never hit so hard in love”. I find it feminist.

What’s not feminist is people saying about twerking, and tongues, and oh dear. Meanwhile that creepy guy who was shoving his junk at her crotch and is twice her age is hiding his piggy eyes behind aviators and being congratulated for a rapey plagiarized song.

O that was ranty. I do just like her even though I’m old, and think she’ll do fine.

My sister really likes Miley. She made me watch some MTV reality kind of show where Miley was arriving at some event and she got really pissed off(in a good “wanting to get everything right” way) when the entrance didn’t go the way it was supposed to. She’s sharper than the pop music tween idol she comes across as. I am guessing Dolly’s mentored her at least a little in how to deal with fame/music etc.

I heard this Jolene cover a while ago, before the twerking debacle, and I thought it was reasonably good then, and still do.

But I don’t think her voice is anything special. Her dancing, if you can call it that, sucks, and that is to say nothing of the racist implications of its content, merely her skill. And I don’t know if she writes her songs, but I don’t think they’re very good, so she’s either bad at writing them or bad at picking them.

I don’t follow her enough to know what the objectification of black women’s bodies thing is about. What did she do?

She twerked – cultural equivalent of Pat Boone covering R & B songs

Although not yet born in 1955, I’m aged enough to remember Pat Boone as a very very white singer (rather than a maker of late night commercials) and also to have needed to google “twerk” when the controversy arose.

Every time that the Miley Cyrus vocal talent issue comes up, I post this. This time is no exception. She can sing and she seems to have respect for her musical roots. She is, what, 20 or 21? Let her be.

I just got in from seeing Jake Bugg live at House of Blues in Houston. If he is near you and you like like rockabilly, skiffle, or folk style rock you need to catch him. At 19 he seems to be a once in a generation talent. One hell of a show.

She’s doing what she has to do to be a star, in this day and age, when becoming a pop star means more than just getting DJ’s to play you on the radio and the kids to buy your 45’s and/or LP’s.

She’s been working pretty hard, since at a young age and wants to keep going.

Is she very sexualized? Yes.

But that seems to be what the entertainment industry has been demanding of female singers, especially since the 1980’s, when looks helped get you on MTV (back when they played music videos) and Madonna took it up a notch by using sexual suggestion to grab attention. Though by today’s standards, Madonna in the mid-1980’s is super-duper tame. Same with Tawny Kitaen in the White Snake videos.

Miley has to out-do Madonna and Britney and the “dirty” Christina Aguilara phase, in terms of producing the needed “outrage”, to get the headliner pop-star attention the entertainment media seems to demand of female singers.

If the pop-star culture consuming public has a different wave length for what it tunes into, then we’d see different behavior from female pop-stars.

I’ll be perfectly content if she ever becomes comfortable in her own skin and finds a path that allows her to make the transition from entertainer to musician. From what little I’ve seen and heard she has some measure of actual talent unlike many that drill into the Uberentertainer-media spectacle aquifer. Time will tell whether she can become a singer or is doomed to be just another Madonna. Sully will buy her records, at least.

@Omnes Omnibus: Have to agree. Can’t say I knew any of her songs, but when I ran across her doing that Dylan tune, and subsequently the previously mentioned Melanie song, I developed a solid respect for her voice, and her taste in songs to cover.

I was surprised by Miley’s cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.’ She did it for Amnesty International’s fund-raising CD, ‘Chimes of Freedom.’ I think if she stops trying so hard to be so edgy and hip and relies on good material performed well, she could amount to something more than a singer of empty hit records.

Love your music threads. Last Christmas you ran a ‘5 Albums you must have on a desert island’ type list and I got a lot of ideas for presents. Have you every heard of the genre ‘Americana’. Well it was new to me a few months ago when Austin City Limits highlighted a few groups. One of them is the ‘Mavericks’. I don’t know much about their country years but their last album ‘In Time’ is a great mix of Rockabilly, Mariachi, and a few others thrown in. Terrific.

I can’t stand Wrecking Ball because she is just yell-singing like Katy Perry. But the reason it really bothers me is because I know she can truly sing. I hope that some day she is able to make real music again and I will listen to her. Until then when I hear her, I change the station.

@Len: When I was a wee thing, I heard the (newly released) Dolly Parton version on the radio. I didn’t know who Dolly Parton was, hell I didn’t know what Country music was (Motown and BeBop ruled in my house), but I was enthralled.

The trouble for Cyrus is that child music stars seem to have just two paths to adult success in music, if they’re wanting to break free of the Disney mold or similar juggernaut and go it alone. Either be extremely talented and manage to garner critical acceptance very quickly when out on your own (Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift to some extent), or shock everyone into keeping you in their consciousness (Britney Spears and now Miley Cyrus). In any event, the underlying problem is the pop culture problem of needing to stay relevant ALL THE TIME before you fall off the planet and no one cares about you anymore, but having to do this at an extremely tender age, where even if you do have significant talent it’s not likely polished enough or combined with a preternatural maturity to help you compete with the likes of Jake Bugg and Lorde, not to mention acts that have been together for years and are in their late ’20’s and beyond.

I think, given her limitations (she has an accurate and fairly strong voice, but somewhat limited range, and not particularly good songwriting skills at her age; her selection of covers feels contrived, as well), Cyrus would have been better off with a gradual maturation and slower emergence from the teeny bop cocoon. I don’t blame her for wanting to declare her independence earlier, but I do think she’s perhaps lacking some of the chops for it. And I do criticize her for choosing to become a tramp as part of that process. I don’t hate her over it, but I have lost whatever respect I otherwise might have for her. There are other ways to declare your independence and adulthood. Yeah, call me a prude. I have a 9 year old daughter. I don’t need her thinking that wearing fishnet dresses with pasties and grinding with your tongue out of your mouth and humping construction implements in a video is acceptable behavior. We have an incredibly sexualized tween/teen world, as it is. So now I have to explain to her why Miley Cyrus is not setting a good example, which is a pain in the rear and difficult to discuss without getting into topics too old for her. Fortunately, from what I understand, all the kids are down on Miley now because she has a stupid new haircut or something, so I’ll take it.

You can torture me
With Donnie & Marie
You can play some Barry Manilow
Or you can play some schlock
Like New Kids On The Block
Or any Village People song you know
Or play Vanilla Ice
Hey, you can play him twice
And you can play the Bee Gees any day
But Mr. DJ, please
I’m beggin’ on my knees
I just can’t take no more of Billy Ray

Don’t play that song
That “Achy Breaky” song
The most annoying song I know
And if you play that song
That “Achy Breaky” song
I might blow up my radio, oooh…

You can clear the room
By playing Debbie Boone
Or crank your ABBA records until dawn
Oh, I could even hear
Slim Whitman or Zamfir
Don’t mind a Yoko Ono marathon
Or play some Tiffany
On 8-track or CD
Or scrape your fingernails across the board
Or tie me to a chair
And kick me down the stairs
Just please don’t play that stupid song no more

Don’t play that song
That “Achy Breaky” song
You know I hate that song a bunch
And if you play that song
That nauseating song
It might just make me lose my lunch, oooh…

Don’t play that song
That “Achy Breaky” song
I think it’s driving me insane
Oh, please don’t play that song
That irritating song
I’d rather have a pitchfork in my brain…

Don’t play that song
That “Achy Breaky” song
The most annoying song I know
And if you play that song
That “Achy Breaky” song
I might blow up my radio, oooh-woo…

It still strikes me as a little overproduced for a ‘backyard sessions’.

There’s no way that what we’re hearing was actually recorded at the same time as the video was shot. Most of the instruments don’t even appear to be properly miked. Why call it a “backyard session” and then overdub it with a studio recording?

@Paul in KY: Yes, that’s sort of obvious, though, right? So was Hannah Montana. In any event, a character, yes, but as what, some sort of satire? Making a statement about people who act like that? Secret wish fulfillment? Lots of acts have a stage persona or two; it’s more powerful if it’s clear what the point of them is, though. If the point here is, as I suspect, as simple as “I’m a grownup now,” well, point poorly made and this particular reader begs to differ. Also, whether it’s her true self or not is sort of immaterial when a large part of her audience is still too young to grasp the difference, and/or irony.

I’m no audio engineer, but they could have recorded it in the backyard and then mixed in some studio recorded instrumentals during post-production, or the producer just digitally enhanced the shit out of it to the point of making it sound like a studio recording.

Probably been posted, I can’t listen to YouTube links at work, but I am partial to Rhonda Vincent’s bluegrassy version of Jolene. I also love the original Dolly Parton and the slowed-down version. Miley’s version is OK, and I don’t mind her entertainment shenanigans in general, also she did a nice cover of Dylan’s “You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go” on Amnesty’s Chimes of Freedom compilation, and I think she has a decent voice.